BABY BLOOD (1990) d. Alain Robak (France)
SINGAPORE SLING (1990) d. Nikos Nikolaidis (Greece)
After the excesses of the 1980s, the horror genre struggled to redefine itself, leaving the door open for a handful of international auteurs to collectively veer off the well-lit path, and plunge into something stranger, darker, and defiantly uncommercial. The year was 1990, and the filmmakers in question were less interested in cheap thrills and more committed to unsettling viewers on a deeper, more lingering level. Tonight, we’re celebrating the 35th anniversary of three such releases, Baby Blood, The Reflecting Skin, and Singapore Sling, movies that remain essential viewing for the modern horror fan who craves something bold, transgressive, and artfully off-kilter.
Baby Blood, directed by Alain Robak, is a French body-horror oddity that grafts splatter sensibilities onto a surreal, pitch-black comedy of cosmic malevolence. Emmanuelle Escourrou, in a ferocious, full-bodied performance, anchors the film as Yanka, a woman forced into a parasitic relationship with a creature growing inside her. Examining the quote/unquote “monstrous female experience,” Baby Blood gleefully pushes past good taste toward something primal, anarchic, and gleefully grotesque.
British-born writer/director Philip Ridley gives us The Reflecting Skin, which plays like a fever dream of post-war Americana rotting from the inside out. Starring a young Viggo Mortensen alongside an even younger Jeremy Cooper, Ridley crafts a world where childhood innocence dissolves into gothic dread, and every sun-drenched frame seems to hum with menace. With hypnotic pacing, painterly visuals, operatic musical score, and beautifully broken characters, the ambiguous and very human horror echoes loud and long.
Then comes Singapore Sling, the taboo-smashing masterpiece by Greek director Nikos Nikolaidis. A twisted noir filtered through the aesthetics of avant-garde theater, the film stars Panos Thanassoulis, Meredyth Herold, and Michele Valley in a sadomasochistic triangle that defies categorization. Its mixture of fetishism, pitch-black humor, and expressionistic style still has the power to outshock today’s so-called boundary-pushing filmmakers, and looks great doing it.
Join AC and his adventurous panel of guests (Emily Barney, S.A. Bradley, Vanessa Morgan) as we celebrate these three unforgettable art-house nightmares that still resonate 35 years later, and explore what they continue to teach us about the ever-evolving language of horror!
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